Getting Close…

Still re-assembling the CL. We just need one more critical part before it can be a roller. We are still trying to track down a special axle nut/spacer for the front axle. Between the forks from the 500 and the wheel/hub from the 360, something got lost in the translation. It took a bit of sleuthing to figure out what we needed, but we think we have it sorted. Salvage Steve has the part, we believe. Once we can connect with him, and once the seat comes home from the upholsterer, this pig’s gonna fly!

In the mean time, we have assembled the 5oo fork, which Brandon at the Motoshop re-built with love. I think this is his third of fourth fork re-constructi0n for this particular bike. The headlight is on, as well as the clip-ons and controls. We ran the throttle cable after some custom mods to the new throttle tube. We also got Andy at WELD Studio to attach an aluminum bracket to the underside of the top triple clamp so we can get the speedo mounted.

We got the carbs all mounted up and somewhat bench-synched. They should be in great shape as Jaxon already cleaned and re-built them.

The new cone filters are obviously mounted as well. Stay tuned for a possible custom mod to the filters as suggested by our mechanic which increases air velocity as it enters the carb…

Here’s another pic of the little turn indicator switch that we found & wired up. It turned out nice & minimal:

Josh got the wiring all tidied up & finalized. Josh is quickly becoming the Charlie Daniels of the soldering iron! He’s the man. About 60-70% of the wiring harness was eliminated. Everything tucks up quite nicely into and around the extremely small battery box. There have been jokes of the next bike having a battery box the size of a wheel barrow to ease the wiring process. It’s tight in there! Maybe a wiring box side-car with redundant SUV batteries? Yeeeah.

We did run into a wiring hurdle which had both of us scratching our heads and generally becoming grumpy/pissed off at the process of wiring this bike (and all bikes in general). We had to call upon the expertise of ‘the Phil’ one more time to help sort it out. After a couple of hours of trouble shooting we discovered that the new regulator/rectifier unit has to be grounded to function properly. There is no ground wire for it, and the instructions said nothing about this, it just grounds its body to the frame where its mounted. Quite a few voltage tests eventually revealed this fact. Once that was cleared up, Josh was able to plow through the rest of the system pretty quickly.

Wiring sucks.

Here’s a shot of the now extremely tidy battery box area:

The other final item is the fuel tank. The rust is pretty well cleaned out. We think we’ll go ahead an coat the interior with a rust prohibiting agent. Then we just need to mount it & get the fuel lines attached & filters attached. There’s a bit of a fuel tank boneyard forming next to the shop…